The Chosen (The Compendium of Raath, Book 1) (11 page)

“How old are you?” she asked.

Otom thought about lying, but decided
against it. “Sixteen,” he said.

She whistled. “That's young to be fighting
in the Kilgaan tourney isn't it? Could have a good beard on ya for
sixteen, though. If you let it grow out, ya know?”

“I shaved it close so I could fight. We grow
'em big up in the north, though.” Otom shrugged coolly. “How old
are you?”

“Seventeen. But I'm not fighting. Some girls
do though, right?”

“Yeah,” said Otom. “Seen a few.” He adjusted
himself in his seat so he could face her better.

“Can you see me in the arena?” Allura
giggled. She made some mock punching gestures, sloshing her drink a
little too hard.

Otom could think of nothing more exciting,
but the second he opened his mouth to attempt to say something
witty, a man walked up to his table.

“Making friends, I see,” the man said. He
was a few fingers taller than Otom, and he stood like a fighter.
His forearms were layered with muscles and he carried himself in a
relaxed manner that said he was ready to move in any direction at
any moment.

“Ris!” said Allura, throwing her arms around
him. “You found me!”

He's too old for
Allura,
Otom thought, desperately.
Maybe he's her brother.

“Course I found you. Name's Ris,” the large
man said, extending his hand to Otom with Allura still clinging to
him.

“I gathered,” Otom said, taking the grip and
squeezing pretty hard. It was actually fairly even. “I'm Otom from
Pakken.”

“Isola region,” Ris said. “Some good
fighters come outta there.”

Otom nodded, making sure not to say the
first dumb thing that came into his head.

“He's young, dontcha think, Ris?” Allura
asked.

Otom was indeed young to be fighting in the
Kilgaan Tournament. The tournament was organized into weight
groups, with Otom fighting in the thirty-stone group. He wasn't
sure if there was another sixteen year old in the tournament. He
had come to this tavern after weighing-in at the arena. He hadn't
noticed Ris at the weigh-in, but his head had been full of sights
and sounds.

“Tournaments are organized to shit up here,”
said Ris, moving his hand dangerously close to Allura's hip. “Had
to rush to the weigh-in. Almost didn't make it. You knew about this
weigh-in bullshit, Otom?”

“Yeah,” Otom said. “It was in the
rules.”

Ris shook his head. “Times used to be you'd
trust a man when he told you how much he weighed. Could eyeball it,
ya know? Now they got these 'stone' weights goin' on. Must be some
Northern Kingdom measurement. We don't have it in Marshanti.”

“How did they pick the stone to use?” Allura
asked in mock jest.

“See, that's what I mean,” Ris said, taking
the question entirely too seriously for Otom's taste. “It's
arbitrary. Can't even see any fuckin' stones under all this snow.
You northmen have an advantage up here. Come fight in the south.
You'll sweat to death!” Ris laughed. “It's so cold up here that my
nuts are in my stomach!”

Allura laughed. “Hardly!” she said.

Otom's heart sank. That wasn't the sort of
thing you said in front of your sister, and not your typical
sister-response. Otom's hopes for anything involving Allura began
to dwindle. She had her strong man here, she didn't need Otom. But
she had walked over to him . . .

“-fighting in the thirty-two stone weight,
just barely,” Ris was saying.

Otom was about to respond, but was cut
off.

“Do we really have to talk fighting all
night?” Allura pleaded with Ris. She turned to Otom. “He loves to
talk about fighting. He'll go on and on and on if you let him.”

“I thought you liked fighting,” Otom
replied.

“Like to watch. Like to touch. Don't like to
talk.” She took a sip of her drink and then raised the glass a bit
higher into the air. “This tastes fantastic!”

“What did you get, Lura?” Ris asked.

“Some kind of cherry . . . snow cherry
something or other. I don't even know.”

“Otom, you don't have anything to drink,”
Ris said.

“I don't drink the week before a
tournament.”

That was apparently Ris's invitation to sit
down in the booth. “You know what?” he said. “I don't either. Some
of these brawlers'll drink themselves all to shit and when they
fight the next day they lock up. Muscles won't work. You hear their
breath all raspy and you can hear their tongues smackin' in their
mouths.”

Otom knew. He had fought against men like
that. He nodded.

“You're built,” Ris said.
“And you got a good head on your shoulders, Otom.” He lowered his
voice to a whisper as if he were divulging a great secret. “These
men that fight with weapons . . . swords, you know. Shields. What
if your sword is on the ground, man? What if your shield gets stuck
in . . . stuck in a fuckin' tree? Ya gotta know how to defend
yourself with
nothing
. Ya gotta know how to fight naked.”

“Riiiiis,” sang Allura. “Don't go into this,
please. You'd do everything naked if you could. I need another one
of these,” she said, staring into her mostly empty glass.

“Cuz there are bad men out there,” Ris
continued. “You know the kind. A knife's just a tool. It's not
pure. If ya can't brain someone with your bare hands, what kinda
man are you?” Passion shone in his eyes and he seemed to be
awaiting a response, but Otom was busy watching Allura walk away.
She had a way of moving through the crowd that almost looked like a
dance. She dodged drunken patrons and serving girls with ease,
swishing the hem of her dress from side to side.

“Who did you study under?” Ris asked,
undaunted by Otom's lack of participation. Otom noticed how much
deeper Ris's voice was than his own.

“I call him Silence," Otom said. "He doesn't
talk at all during training. And he's completely blind.”

Ris leaned forward and squinted. “You're
shittin' me.”

“No I'm not,” Otom said, not knowing what
else to say.

It took a moment for Ris to absorb the weird
information. “Huh,” he said, leaning back against the booth
divider. “I trained under a man named Screaming Grizzly. Probably a
much different method of teaching.”

“Lots of yelling, I'm sure,” Otom said.

“Gotta have a war cry. Gets the blood up, ya
know?” Ris slapped his hand hard on the table. Otom was embarrassed
that he jumped a little at the sound. “If you can't get angry, how
are you supposed to throttle some guy?”

Allura was back with another sloshing
snow-cherry-something-or-other. “It's all ale down where we come
from,” she complained. “Ale, ale, ale.” She took a long, healthy
swallow of her drink and then looked through the side of the glass
at it. “I thought I ordered a full one!” she exclaimed, then
plopped herself down next to Ris.

“Did your master come with you?” Ris asked
Otom. “Silence?”

“No,” Otom said. “Made the journey myself.
Pakken isn't that far away.”

“It's gotta be thirty bands at least, Otom!”
Allura said with wide eyes. “You rode all that way? You didn't
freeze to death?”

Otom shrugged. “Didn't ride. Walked. I grew
up in the north. My dad says we're almost immune to the cold.”

“No one is immune to nature,” Ris said, a
serious look on his face. “Nature is the greatest adversary of the
naked fighter.”

Otom couldn't tell if that was a joke or
not, so he half-smiled.

Ris was waving to someone across the tavern
now. “Hey,” he said turning back to Otom. “Some friends from
Marshanti just tracked me down. 'Lura, we gotta go mingle, ya know?
My advice to you Otom: get into the camaraderie of the whole thing.
Meet people. Get to know your fellow fighters.”

Ris pushed Allura out of the booth firmly
enough to miff Otom, but gently enough that he didn't say anything
about it.

“Bye Otom,” she said. “It was nice to
meetchoo, even if't was brief.” Her words were slurred ever so
slightly. She couldn't have weighed more than seventeen stone, and
those snow-cherry-something-or-others were probably pretty
strong.

“See ya, Aldenburg,” Ris said, grabbing
Allura's wrist and tugging her off towards whomever he had waved
at.

Otom wasn't sure if he liked Ris. There was
something very weird lying just below the surface of that man. He
didn't think he'd ever met anybody like Ris before, but he decided
to put his mind squarely on the tournament now that Allura was out
of sight.

But Ris had called him
“Aldenburg”. Ris hadn't been there when he had told Allura his last
name. Something sank in the pit of Otom's stomach. He had been
scouted. He'd heard of it happening.
I'm
in over my head.

Ris now knew Otom's region, town, age. Small
facts, but then . . .

Otom had divulged his master without
thinking. If Ris knew the styles he could counter them.

He had let Ris watch him jump at the slap of
his hand on the table. They had shaken hands. The strength of his
grip. The man had been feeling him out.

And what did he know about Ris? Nothing,
really. He couldn't know if he was really from Marshanti, or if his
name was really Ris, or even if he studied under a master named
Screaming Grizzly. It sounded like a dumb, made-up name now that
Otom thought about it.

He knew Ris would be in his weight group,
regardless of what he had said about fighting in the thirty-two
stone group. That was probably a lie, too.

Otom had been so off guard the whole time,
gawking at Allura and her beautiful face.

And that's when it really hit him. It hurt
to think that maybe the blond-haired angel had been a planned
distraction, and that she had been in on the whole operation.

“Get to know your fellow fighters, indeed,”
muttered Otom. He laid his head in his arms and tried to shut out
the world.

T
he hard-packed dirt came up to meet Otom's back, but he spun
his legs in the air and regained his footing almost immediately.
Ris was on him, rushing up to greet him with a large open palm slap
to the side of the head. Otom barely got his arm up in time to even
half-block the blow and then Ris danced into another
combination.

Fists flew quicker than Otom had ever
encountered, coming in so many places that he had to concentrate
entirely on blocking rather than launching an attack of his own. He
blocked his neck, stomach, shoulder, other shoulder, jaw, and
somehow – through a miracle of reflex - his groin. All of that had
happened in the space of a few heartbeats.

Otom felt blood trickle down his face. The
fist wraps they were forced to wear would protect against the worst
of it, but he still got cut up while fighting, skin splitting from
impact.

The crowd roared around them making it hard
for Otom to hear. Hearing the scrape of a foot on the dirt could
mean the difference between blocking a kick and never seeing it
coming.

His master had taught him to listen; always
listen. Listening in combat had been the core of his training.
Silence's students had been required to block punches while
blindfolded and to be able to hear the sound of a piece of straw
being dropped into snow.

Silence once said that a man gained more
from one minute of listening than he did from an hour of talking.
Otom had forgotten that lesson, and now he was fighting Ris in the
semi-finals and having a bad time of it.

The Arena was ablaze with sound and heat and
Otom couldn't imagine fighting like this in the south. It was near
freezing outside, but in the ring he was sweating, breath coming
from him in white clouds. Ris had been right: Otom would have
passed out long ago in Marshanti's warmer climate.

Otom swept his foot down to the ground, but
Ris jumped over it, slamming a fist directly toward the side of
Otom's head. The blow connected with his ear, sending a jolt of
pain through his head. The impact made him shudder and he scampered
back to a position of safety. He faced Ris with his hands out in
front of him.

He's going for my
ears.
One was already ringing from the
barely deflected open-hand slap and now the other one felt like it
was filled up with liquid.
More
blood
, he realized morbidly.

But Ris would have known those moves
wouldn't matter in a strategic sense. Otom couldn't hear over the
frenzy of the screaming crowd anyway. This was a morale tactic.

Otom opened his mouth and let out a scream.
His voice wasn't deep like Ris's, but it was powerful. The crowd
reacted to the energy of the youngest fighter in the tournament,
filling the arena with even thicker noise.

Otom charged at Ris, not
sure what to do, but knowing, deep down in his gut, that he had
already lost.
Am I simply getting it over
with?
Right out of the gate Ris had been
faster, stronger, and better prepared. He had come at Otom with a
frightening level of aggression. It had made his muscles feel
weaker just to see Ris's face.

The two fighters came together with a smack
that was lost in the roar of the crowd and then, as Otom struggled
and twisted, Ris was on top of him on the ground.

All fights end on the
ground.

Ris tucked his head right up next to Otom's,
the man's legs and arms curled around the boy and Otom could swear
he felt nine or ten limbs instead of just four. It was some hold he
didn't know, and didn't care to know. Ris hissed in his ear, “War
cries are my thing, Aldenburg. So's fuckin' Allura.”

Otom struggled underneath. The darkness of
Ris's hair blocked his vision and turned the world black, but he
could see silver stars crawling across that blackness. The pressure
Ris was putting on him was immense. He felt like he was trapped
under a boulder, all his limbs bending in amazingly painful ways,
his chest unable to draw breath.